It's not just about the software but about the hardware architecture of the car. Legacy manufacturers are coming from a situation where they are integrating har

It's not just about the software but about the hardware architecture of the car. Legacy manufacturers are coming from a situation where they are integrating hardware and software from a lot of different suppliers. This makes upgrading the car a very tedious process and slows down the process of getting suppliers to fix issues and provide new firmware in a timely fashion. It's worse for them because they often want to do ICE and EV variants of the same car. Which means sticking with the same supply chains and associated issues. Vertically integrated companies do this very differently. Tesla pioneered this. The Chinese copied this and at this point you also have companies like Rivian and a few of the legacy manufacturers that are doing the same. Effectively they in house all the software and e.g. Rivian runs the software on a handful of hardware subsystems instead of having hundreds of chips with their own firmware for things like the wind screen wipers, the software that controls the windows, the AC, the keyfob, AI driving features, and so on. I mention Rivian here because they just did a deal with VW to start doing the same for them. The issues here are not just technical but cultural. I used to work in Nokia when it was in the (slow) process of figuring out that they were a software company rather than a hardware company. Then Apple and Google came along and they were slow to adapt their internal processes and management. Apple makes firmware that goes on their phone. They provide OTA updates. There's only one supported version of that firmware: the current & latest one. It's the same for all phones they still support with updates. Nokia did the opposite. They forked their software for each product variant (dozens per year). And they did not do OTA upgrades. So most of their phones weren't updated at all (by users), and would typically ship with bugs that had already been fixed on other branches of the software. And it would ship on the schedule of the manufacturing process, regardless of the state of the software. With all the obvious consequences. Nokia got a well deserved reputation of shipping half baked software. By the time MS bought them out, they had learned and improved a lot but Apple and Google were running circles around them by then and it did not matter anymore. You see the same with car manufacturers currently. It's all about the buttons and the bling. They have a gazillion of upsells, features, special trims, and what not. And it all adds up to a whole lot of nothing if the software experience isn't great. That's why VW is paying billions to Rivian to fix that for them. Their cars are too expensive, have too many chips and wires, and their software just isn't good enough. And they don't have ten years to figure this out for themselves. That's what Rivian is supposedly fixing for them.